14 ms·

Wait, so is the idea of those proposals that the federal government or the courts or the lawyers are going to be in charge of deciding what counts as aggressive

• Meekro 6y ago
  The proposal still lets platforms moderate on certain grounds, a repeal would mean that a platform can't moderate for any reason other than "illegal content" if it wants to keep the protection. The law currently says that a platform can moderate material that is "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." That "otherwise objectionable" has been interpreted as a catch-all that lets platforms moderate on any grounds at all. The DoJ proposal removes the catch-all and add "unlawful" and "promotes terrorism" to the list. So if you moderate for a reason on that list, you keep the protection. If you moderate for other reasons, you lose it. And yes, I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc.
  • mpoteat 6y ago
    Does this mean if a sports fan comes into my forum about programming and starts making sports threads, I cannot moderate that away, or else face legal action? Does it also mean HN could face legal action according to its current rule set?
    • username90 6y ago
      Spamming would go under harassment in most cases.
    • agrajag 6y ago
      Yes, except for the fact that 1st amendment protections would still exist. How much protection that actually provides is unknown and it would need to be litigated to find out.
      • notahacker 6y ago
        Suffice to say a redraft which means that you'll have to go to court to determine what types of content you are and aren't allowed to moderate without the side effect of becoming responsible for everything people say on your web property is not an improvement.
      • danShumway 6y ago
        What does that mean? Off-topic discussion does not fall outside of the 1st Amendment, and a restriction of the 1st Amendment to try and classify that as somehow less deserving of protection -- that would be a much greater curtailment of 1st Amendment rights than anything Facebook has done. Bluntly, "would need to be litigated to find out" isn't an acceptable answer given that the people giving this answer are the same people proposing the legislation. Courts don't decide what the law is, they interpret it. You have to have an idea of what you want the law to be, you can't kick that off to the courts. They're trying to interpret your intention and the letter of the law you propose, not the other way around.
    • dd36 6y ago
      What legal action would you be concerned about?
      • graeme 6y ago
        If your forum had money, you’d be a sitting duck for someone claiming their rights were violated and demanding compensation.
        • daniellarusso 6y ago
          Or once they obtain a judgement, seize your domain name.
        • dd36 6y ago
          And they’d have to prove it in a court of law.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      This is the definitive question that has to be asked of anybody proposing a repeal of 230. I personally dislike 230, and have from the beginning, but anybody who doesn't have a direct and complete answer to this question isn't being serious. edit: I personally think that the answer is to standardize terms-of-service documents and to make them into real legal statements that both the website visitor and owner can make claims regarding, and that those statements be registered with a federal agency. The standardization should be so tight that filing it should be a matter of picking from drop down menus on a form, and the implications of each choice should be common knowledge and taught in school. The form should be able to be filled out anonymously (as "owner of [X] site.") If you run a site without having filed one, though, you would lose legal protections as a publisher based on modding behavior. If somebody filing suit can point out any decisions that have been defined by law as constituting a specific degree of editorial control (examples: spam-control, abuse-control, subject-control, position-on-a-subject-control, arbitrary-control, etc.) then they will be responsible for libel/tort claims as a site for individual posts. A site that has filed a terms-of-service will get the benefit of the doubt, and the ability to push liability onto completely onto posters or maybe even individual mods. Those requirements would either be too onerous to run the walled gardens of Web 2.0 at scale and small players will have a profitable business opening again, or the big dogs would be forced to really bureaucratize or democratize, and small players will have a profitable business opening by providing them modding services at the forum level.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • not2b 6y ago
        I was a founding member of the egcs steering committee. When we were creating the rules, we had a debate over whether we should have a specific list of offenses that would allow us to ban someone: some wanted a specific list, others just wanted a supermajority to vote the person out. We settled on a 3/4 vote of steering committee members. I wrote the justification, saying that we shouldn't be stuck if someone came up with a new and creative way to cause damage. And sure enough, we only banned one person ever. We banned him because he made a series of scary threats against the release manager, including "I know where you live", but these threats were made off-list, it was a campaign of personal harassment because no one wanted this idiot's patches. Suppose we had forgotten to include threats of violence off-list in our expected set of rules? And remember, we were talking about our mailing lists, which are forums according to section 230. So, would we lose our section 230 protections under your proposal?
  • Daho0n 6y ago
    > I'm sure we'd see plenty of litigation on what constitutes harassment, terrorism, etc. Let me predict how terror will end up being defined: Promote storming the Capitol - No Promote a free Palestine - Yes Any fight against US oppression - No
    • danShumway 6y ago
      This is getting downvoted, probably because it's pushing an unrelated agenda, but there's an important principle here that both Democrats and Republicans don't seem to understand: at some point, the other party just 100% is going to seize control of the government. It is going to happen. Donald Trump's administration openly considered declaring BLM a terrorist group. I don't want someone like that deciding what does and doesn't count as neutral speech. That is a thousand times more dangerous to me than Facebook making the same decision. It is startlingly naive for people not to understand that terrorism laws and 'neutral-speech' laws will be used against causes they agree with. Republicans in particular are kind of jumping the gun by encouraging the government to get involved with speech literally during a period where they no longer control the presidency, or the house, or the senate.
  • modmans2nd 6y ago
    You obviously didn’t bother reading the article
• leereeves 6y ago
  Making decisions like that is why we have courts. They are responsible for deciding whether a particular act was murder or self-defense, whether something is pornography or art, whether something is protected or forbidden by the Constitution, etc. They're far from perfect, but is it better to give the power to control digital communications to a few corporations?
  • kangaroozach 6y ago
    The answer depends on whether you are a radical or not. A hate filled SJW as well as a brainwashed NPC actually believes the ends justifies the means and their stone cold hatred of their “perceived” political enemies justifies total censorship and control over our “digital” public forums.
    • dang 6y ago
      Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. The site is overrun with this kind of thing at the moment, and we're banning accounts who do it. I'm not going to ban yours because it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, but please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended use of the site from now on.
  • modmans2nd 6y ago
    Section 230 doesn’t give social media any more power than they have under the first amendment. It is simply a shield from nuisance lawsuits.
    • leereeves 6y ago
      It does though. For example, it gives them the power to refuse to remove false information without being held responsible for it, which the first amendment does not give to publishers like the NYT.
      • jakelazaroff 6y ago
• stale2002 6y ago
  > Is that supposed to be better? There already exists laws that act very similarly to what people are proposing. Specifically these laws are called common carrier laws, as they apply to phone systems, for example. Do you believe that the existing laws, that apply to phone networks, are tyrannical or worse or bad? I don't think it is unreasonable to consider how our existing laws, that most people find reasonable, such as the ones that already apply to phone companies, could be updated to the modern era, so as to apply to newer communication networks.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    I don't think phone and Internet providers are the same as social networking sites. I'm happy to let people I don't like have their own websites. I don't want to be forced to let them use mine to post about how I should die.
    • ghaff 6y ago
      FWIW, Section 230 was added primarily so that ISPs and hosting providers wouldn't be liable for content on their sites given that social media as we know it today basically didn't exist.
      • mojzu 6y ago
        My understanding was the origins of section 230 were because of a couple of lawsuits that targetted ISPs for content that users posted on their services. One company moderated their content, they were found liable for libel in user content in court. The other company did not moderate their content, they were not found liable for their user content. Anecdotally one of these services was seen as the good one and the other as the crappy one because of their moderation policies. While social media didn't exist at the time in its current form, I'd argue this is still very relevant today. Without section 230 websites would only be able to moderate for illegal content, and there's a mountain of stuff you wouldn't want to see online that isn't technically illegal, and a lot of people who will try to put it in front of you if given the oppurtunity.
• roenxi 6y ago
  Judges are the ones we all officially trust to make judgments. It isn't better as such to get them involved, but it might become necessary. I won't worry about technicalities, because I have no idea what they are. But it is becoming abundantly clear that the social media companies have political power and are willing to wield it if they think that it is appropriate, similar to newspapers and television. It is reasonable that the regulations for social and non-social media converge.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    > Judges are the ones we all officially trust to make judgments. That's not a good reason to DDoS them, though.
  • recny 6y ago
    The problem with leaving it to the courts is, people who own small niche forums can't afford to fight legal battles. This will leave an internet for those who can (i.e the big players).
    • humanrebar 6y ago
      Also, courts have a habit of leaving arcane technical details to regulators and then we end up back at government regulation of internet speech.
      • xxpor 6y ago
        The alternative is leaving it up to corporations so the current status quo doesn't seem that bad. (See everyone that wants to repeal Chevron deference)
        • humanrebar 6y ago
          Or the courts could insist the legislature does its job -- write legislation.
  • neltnerb 6y ago
• danShumway 6y ago
  It's pretty revealing that many of the replies to this (and the general response whenever anyone brings up content that we obviously want to be moderated but that doesn't fall outside the 1st Amendment) can be summed up as, "well, we'll make an exception for that." In practice, this constitutes the government deciding what communities themselves are able to moderate and filter. That should terrify 1st Amendment advocates, for multiple reasons: ---- A) It's wildly abusable by corrupt governments, and both parties in the US believe that their opponents are corrupt. You don't even need to outright censor -- you can just classify one political group's speech as harassment and make your own speech un-moderatable. And importantly, when you do that, it doesn't just apply to one platform like Facebook, it applies to everyone. It applies to independent forums that are owned by the other party. Do you really want to give either Republicans or Democrats the ability to basically at-will strip 230 protections from opposition-run forums whenever they control all three houses? ---- B) It places a burden on the courts that courts are not designed for. Courts interpret laws, they don't create them. The implication behind that is that the people making the laws have a general understanding of their own intent, and the Courts try to figure out what that intent is and what the implication of the letter of the law is. It is unreasonable for people to propose legislation that they themselves don't understand, and then ask the courts to retroactively come up with an interpretation and a set of guidelines that make the laws work. It's backwards design that will lead to a lot of unintended consequences and dumb, harmful rulings. ---- C) Many of these exceptions being proposed even in this comment section are themselves contentious. It is not clear to me, at all, why pornography should have fewer 1st Amendment protections than hate speech. Both are harmful to children, both can gross people out, both cause discussions to degrade, both are things that people don't want on their platforms. Yet, there is a general assumption that of course platforms will be able to filter lewd content, they just won't be able to filter low-key racists and nazis. This is exactly the kind of content-favoritism that the 1st Amendment was designed to prevent. It is inherently problematic for the government to privilege certain categories of speech over others. The distinction between pornography and hate speech is one of the more blatant examples of hypocrisy, but the problem also comes up in more subtle ways when people talk about banning spam, as if comment spam, self-promotion, and off-topic discussion are some kind of clear categories that everyone agrees with -- they're not. Reddit, Hackernews, and Facebook all have very different definitions of what self-promotion and spam are. Which definition is correct? Which one should be baked into law? And why? Why is it more reasonable for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of spam than it is for us to come up with an ad-hoc definition of hate speech? Why should spam deserve less protection under the 1st Amendment? ---- D) Finally, baking these exceptions and moderating decisions into law creates an environment where we're constantly chipping away at the 1st Amendment. The way that the US works right now is that we have extremely broad legal protections, but that the systems built on top of those laws provide additional subjective moderation controlled by the free market, by individual choices, and by communities themselves. This is a good system because universal moderation decisions are practically impossible. In short, it gives us breathing room and allows us to acknowledge that moderation is both important and subjective. When people tear away independent, private moderation decisions, the only thing that's left to protect people from harassment online is now the law. You lose that subjectivity and that acknowledgement that different forums need to be moderated differently. People who advocate that private platforms shouldn't be able to make their own moderation decisions should not be surprised to see increased calls for the government to get involved in making certain speech illegal. Even if you could force Twitter or HN to turn into 4Chan, people aren't going to tolerate that. They are going to go to the government and ask the government and the courts to make more speech illegal -- because that's the only avenue they'll have left to protect themselves. ---- I have not seen any proposal, from anyone, not just in general in comments, but from political activists, from bloggers, from lawyers -- I have not seen one single proposal for Section 230 reform that addresses those problems. They all propose an incredibly ambiguous set of restrictions on moderation and then fall back on, "we'll work the details out later." But when you're talking about restricting someone's fundamental Right to Filter[0], the details really matter. [0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-filter